Mozilla spits out last version of Firefox 3.0

On Tuesday, the open sourcers pushed out Firefox 3.0.19, which includes several security and stability updates, and in a brief blog post, Mozilla's Christian Legnitto confirmed that this would be version 3's final incarnation. It patches six vulnerabilities, five listed as critical.

Developed under the codename Grand Paradiso, Firefox 3.0 officially debuted on June 17, 2008 - which Mozilla famously dubbed Download Day - and in its first 24 hours of life, it was downloaded by 8 million unique users, setting a Guinness World Record. Based on version 1.9 of Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine and offering a host of new APIs, it was the first Firefox to pass the industry-standard Acid2 test.

But since then, Mozilla has introduced Firefox 3.5 and then Firefox 3.6, and it's now testing a public alpha of Firefox 3.7. The outfit had originally planned to discontinue Firefox 3.0 in January, but delays to version 3.6 pushed this back a bit. Nonetheless, 3.0 has given up the ghost less than two years after its debut.

Yesterday, the open sourcers also pushed out an update to Firefox 3.5: version 3.5.9, which patches eight security vulnerabilities, five labeled as critical.

The latest stable version of the browser is 3.6.2, and Mozilla is now actively urging users to make the leap to Firefox 3.6, which boosts JavaScript performance and adds various other speed improvements while adding various web technologies. These include the Web Open Font Format, CSS gradients, the HTML5 Drag and Drop API, the File API, and full-screen HTML5 video.

Meanwhile, Mozilla has updated its Thunderbird email client to version 3.0.4 and its SeaMonkey communication suite to version 2.0.4. These patch the same security vulnerabilities as the Firefox 3.5.9 release. All updates are available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. ®